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Spatial Analyst

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GIS technologies / Urban planning and design theories

Below is a handful of my work that I’ve accomplished over the past few years.

Right to the city: Applying justice tests to public transport investments

Many policy-makers are grappling with the twin challenges posed by growing travel demands and persistent socioeconomic inequality. To address these issues, numerous studies propose and apply “justice tests”, which relate the effects of transport policies to prevailing socioeconomic deprivation.

Accessibility is generally accepted as an important benefit of public transportation (PT) systems. Consistent measurement, however, remains a challenge.
This paper proposes methods for measuring accessibility, which we apply to cities in Auckland, Brisbane, Perth, and Vancouver. As the proposed method relies only on open data, meaningful comparisons are possible across a wide range of jurisdictions.
The results indicate that Auckland performs relatively poorly in accessibility compared to Brisbane, Perth, and Vancouver. The methodology developed in this paper is provided as a GIS toolbox, providing planners and analysts with a simple and fast tool to calculate accessibility.

Transit-based Job Accessibility

Using existing Auckland’s General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) and Open Street Map (OSM) data, a model of public transport system in Auckland were developed in ArcGIS environment. All census meshblocks in Auckland metropolitan area was subject to a massive 2.5 billion origin destination matrix to measure average transit-base job accessibility for AM peak as a proxy to measure transit accessibility.

Auckland's Regional Public Transport Plan

In 2013 Auckland Transport adopted the current Regional Public Transport Plan (RPTP) – a document required by legislation and which sets out how the regions public transport system will be developed and operated. Using ArcGIS, Saeid has mapped the current and proposed public transport networks.

Proximity and Integration (The Metropolitan Revolution)

Localized transit noise pollution

This study describes a new approach to measuring transport externalities that
are typically left unmeasured – vehicle noise and emissions. It then applies this
approach to an urban bus fleet, showing how GIS data, simple quantitative
modelling techniques and Python scripting in ArcGIS can be used to understand
the impact of bus operations on urban amenity. Our approach allows us to
analyse and quantify trade-offs between higher fleet costs and better outcomes
on city streets.

transitflow.net

The open data in general transit feed specificatins (TFS) format hidden under the
hood of trip planner software (such as google map) can be used to simulate transit
network for transport planning purposes. transitflow.net utilizes the GTFS to map to
draw the transit flow on Auckland, New Zealand. Saeid was responsible to develop
the methodology, to convert and fix current Auckland's GTFS data and generate the
GIS database for the website in GeoJASON format.

affordability.org.nz

Traditional measures of housing affordability are expressed solely as a function of
housing cost and income. affordability.org.nz quantitatively examines intrametropolitan
combined housing and transport affordability in Auckland, New
Zealand, inspired in part by the article "Housing and transport expenditure: Sociospatial
indicators of affordability in Auckland" by K. Mattingly and J. Morrissey.
Saeid was responsible to develop the methodology and generate underlying GIS data
from Auckland 2013 Census and Auckland open street map data.

Taher-Abad Garden City

Islamic Revolution Housing Foundation selected Taher Abad in eastern suburbs of Tehran to develop a residential complex. Funded by national government, this development was envisaged to be a standard template of modern style development for the private sector. Saeid was a senior urban planner and team leader in this project, working with transport engineers and urban designers. His proficiency in AutoCAD CIVIL 3D and ArcGIS helped him to develop 2D and 3D visualization for this project.